Verisimilitude: The Third Period

Niiniluoto, Ilkka

doi:10.1093/bjps/49.1.1

Cited by 192 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…In the course of the years a large number of articles and a few monographs appeared, and some useful overviews were published that represented the state of the art at that moment (cf. Niiniluoto 1998, Oddie 2008.…”

Section: Truth Approximationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction and Overview

Kuipers

Schurz

2011

Erkenn

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Section: Truth Approximationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction and Overview

Kuipers

Schurz

2011

Erkenn

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“…See Kuipers (1987) for an incomplete collection of approaches. See Niiniluoto (1998) for an important survey and Oddie (2014) for the most recent survey. Some global distinctions are in order.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Models, postulates, and generalized nomic truth approximation

Kuipers

2015

Synthese

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The qualitative theory of nomic truth approximation, presented in Kuipers in his (from instrumentalism to constructive realism, 2000), in which 'the truth' concerns the distinction between nomic, e.g. physical, possibilities and impossibilities, rests on a very restrictive assumption, viz. that theories always claim to characterize the boundary between nomic possibilities and impossibilities. Fully recognizing two different functions of theories, viz. excluding and representing, this paper drops this assumption by conceiving theories in development as tuples of postulates and models, where the postulates claim to exclude nomic impossibilities and the (not-excluded) models claim to represent nomic possibilities. Revising theories becomes then a matter of adding or revising models and/or postulates in the light of increasing evidence, captured by a special kind of theories, viz. 'data-theories'. Under the assumption that the data-theory is true, achieving empirical progress in this way provides good reasons for the abductive conclusion that truth approximation has been achieved as well. Here, the notions of truth approximation and empirical progress are formally direct generalizations of the earlier ones. However, truth approximation is now explicitly defined in terms of increasing truth-content and decreasing falsity-content of theories, whereas empirical progress is defined in terms of lasting increased accepted and decreased rejected content in the light of increasing evidence. These definitions are strongly inspired by a paper of Gustavo Cevolani, Vincenzo Crupi and Roberto Festa, viz., "Verisimilitude and belief change for conjunctive theories" (Cevolani et al. in Erkenntnis 75(2):183-222, 2011).

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“…As most scientific statements are strictly speaking false, this result made Popper's definition useless, something he explicitly acknowledged (Popper, 1979, p. 371). Since then, researchers have come up with a plethora of alternative verisimilitude definitions that do not suffer from the drawback of Popper's proposal (for an overview, see Niiniluoto, 1998). Three decades after the publications of Tichý and Miller, we have more than a dozen different verisimilitude definitions, each of which is claimed by its author(s) to be the most adequate one.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An impossibility theorem for verisimilitude

Zwart

Franssen

2007

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In this paper, we show that Arrow's well-known impossibility theorem is instrumental in bringing the ongoing discussion about verisimilitude to a more general level of abstraction. After some preparatory technical steps, we show that Arrow's requirements for voting procedures in social choice are also natural desiderata for a general verisimilitude definition that places content and likeness considerations on the same footing. Our main result states that no qualitative unifying procedure of a functional form can simultaneously satisfy the requirements of Unanimity, Independence of irrelevant alternatives and Non-dictatorship at the level of sentence variables. By giving a formal account of the incompatibility of the considerations of content and likeness, our impossibility result makes it possible to systematize the discussion about verisimilitude, and to understand it in more general terms.

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Verisimilitude: The Third Period

Cited by 192 publications

References 53 publications

Introduction and Overview

Introduction and Overview

Models, postulates, and generalized nomic truth approximation

An impossibility theorem for verisimilitude

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